matrilineality

An older form of organizing lineages, before the so-called Sky God religions, matrilineality is practiced today by a wide range of cultures across the planet and in the United States by most eastern native American tribes and many others throughout the Americas.

Matrilineally endows children with the family name and lineage, clan, heirlooms, religious practices and duties, as well as property through the maternal line rather than the paternal. Matrilineally, as practiced today by the Haudenausaunee/Iroquois tribes, produces gender equity and balance, while recognizing the relative strengths of each gender. Patrilineality, that is counting one’s lineage through the paternal line, a unreliable way of accurately accounting for bloodlines, appears to have produced a high degree of inequity among peoples throughout the world.